HARDOCP - Introduction - NVIDIA’s Enthusiast System Architecture

Date:: Monday , November 05, 2007
Author:: Kyle Bennett
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NVIDIA’s Enthusiast System Architecture

NVIDIA's ESA promises to deliver some system monitoring tools that reach into system areas that are normally left untouched. Extending a reach into monitoring your PSU, chassis, and cooling system looks to be a very welcome addition to enthusiast hardware.

Introduction

Enthusiast System Architecture is NVIDIA’s newest baby, and unlike pretty much every other NVIDIA technology we have ever seen, this one is “open.” That is right, NVIDIA is sharing their ESA tech and hopefully this will benefit many enthusiasts rather than just the ones willing to buy an NVIDIA motherboard and associated products. While this is certainly a nice gesture, it will however most likely fall on deaf ears when it comes to the competition. Intel is not likely to ever use ESA since they seem hell bent on NVIDIA’s destruction and AMD is not likely to use ESA for the same reason. Either company giving NVIDIA a foothold into their processor-complete platforms seems to be a bit of a pipe dream and you can count on AMD and Intel introducing their own standards soon.

That all aside, ESA looks to be an incredible enthusiast technology. Sadly though, as of today, we have not actually seen any ESA products, but rather just a PDF introducing it. So instead of passing judgment on what is currently vaporware, we thought we would simply share with you, the same thing that NVIDIA has shared with us, and save our analysis and further opinions for another day. We sure want to hear our readers’ thoughts though. Make sure you hit the discussion link below and sound off.

PC industry luminaries, including NVIDIA, Dell, HP, Alienware, Falcon Northwest, CoolerMaster, Thermaltake and others, today announced details of a new open, and royalty-free standard for the real-time monitoring and control of PC power supplies, chassis, and water-cooling systems. The Enthusiast System Architecture (ESA) specifies an information protocol that system components can use to “communicate” with each other to adjust operating parameters, and relay important system information back to the user. By implementing ESA, PC manufacturers and do-it-yourself enthusiasts can now build finely-tuned and higher performance PCs than they could have with existing proprietary solutions. “The industry-standard device communication protocol provided with ESA enables a rich set of tools for tuning PC hardware performance. These tools offer PC enthusiasts more flexible and granular control over primary system support components,” said Kevin Kettler, PhD, and CTO of Dell Inc. “For example, the ESA standard communication method is used in Dell’s unique LightFX architecture, and will help accelerate development of deeply immersive ambient lighting in PC games.”

The new ESA standard is built around the current USB HID class specification and is designed to support new monitoring and control capabilities for PC devices such as chassis, power supplies, and water and air cooling peripherals. Until the introduction of ESA, there was no standard communication protocol allowing such components to report information back to users. Essential data, such as temperature, thermal, voltage, and air flow attributes are made available in real-time and are critical to obtaining maximum PC performance and overclocking. With ESA, component Not for distribution until November 5, 2007 at 6:00 a.m. PST manufacturers can now embed a wide variety of digital and analog sensors into their devices which can communicate real-time data for use in analyzing and optimizing overall PC operating conditions. In addition, ESA’s logging functionality offers PC manufacturers and system builders an inexpensive and easy way to help identify PC operating abnormalities, and enable them to quickly identify and resolve customer support issues.